sketch club!
yay apple approved my new app Sketch Club and it's now in the app store!! (here's a direct link to it in the store)
what is Sketch Club??? it's a super rad drawing / sketching / painting app for ipads, pods, and phones. :) it's got sweet procedural brushes like sketchy and fur (based on trace aka mr. doob's epic html5 sketching experiment harmony and zefrank's scribbler). it's also got smooth (which is my own take on the connect to nearest points action) and side lines (umm great for fuzzy caterpillars?!). along with that procedural madness there are regular brushes like you'd find in photoshop but pared down to the most useful functionality and a vector brush for simplified smooth or polygonal drawing. also there are foreground and background layers to draw in, a photo layer for background or tracing, and canvas color.
that's all pretty sweet, but wait there's more! :) sketch club provides not just the means of creating cool images but also the motivation! integrated with the app is an online gallery where you can upload what you make and enter it into fun competitions! the online bit is very much inspired by the wonderful demoscene portal pouet.net. you can view all the sketches people upload and rate them (rules, piggy, sucks) and as you do you earn glops and after accumulating enough glops you get hearts. it takes a lot to earn hearts so you give them to only your most favorite sketches. one departure from pouet is that while you can give sketches piggy and sucks votes (and they do factor into rankings) they are never displayed to anyone else. this way you don't have to worry about hurting someone's feelings and people won't get discouraged.
you'll notice there's already some pretty amazing sketches in the gallery! while i was working on the app and it was still littered with horrible bugs and missing features some very brave friends tested it out and helped drive its features. omg i lurve you guys, thank you!!!!! :) there are still of course some smaller bugs and tooons of features i didn't get to yet so expect plenty of updates!
okay so even if you don't have an ipod or ipad you can still participate by going to sketchclub.com and logging in with your facebook account. you'll be a guest so you can rate and comment but won't be able to earn hearts or upload sketches. if you do get a device later you can go in the app and link to your facebook account and that will upgrade you to a full member!
so yeah get sketch club and try it out, it's pretty sweet! :)